New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani apologized to the New York City Police Department on Wednesday for his past criticism of the police force, in which he previously called them “racist,” “wicked” and “corrupt.”
“Absolutely, I'll apologize to police officers right here, because this is the apology that I've been sharing with many rank-and-file officers,” Mamdani told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum when asked if he would issue a public apology to them.
“And I apologize because of the fact that I'm looking to work with these officers. And I know that these officers, these men and women who serve in the NYPD, they put their lives on the line every single day,” he added.
Mamdani’s stance over public safety and police support has been a focal point during the New York City mayoral election.
Following the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis – with public outrage over the event prompting waves of protesting over criminal justice and racial inequality in 2020 – Mamdani wrote several posts on X calling to defund the New York City Police Department and criticizing its department.
“We don't need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD,” Mamdani said in June 2020 in a response to another user’s post which has since been deleted. “But your deal with @NYCMayor uses budget tricks to keep as many cops as possible on the beat. NO to fake cuts - defund the police.”
In a multi-post thread in December 2020 responding to a ProPublica report that scrutinized how New York City’s police policed the sex trade, the Democratic Socialist candidate again called for the department to be defunded.
“All this misery. All for money. In the last budget, the City Council tried to make the NYPD reduce its overtime budget by half. They simply refused,” he wrote in December 2020. “There is no negotiating with an institution this wicked & corrupt. Defund it. Dismantle it. End the cycle of violence.”
Mamdani has since sought to distance himself from those remarks, saying he doesn’t want to defund the police and his comments were made during a time of frustration, according to CNN. But Mamdani’s comments on Wednesday go a step further in publicly apologizing to the police department.
The New York Times reported last month that Mamdani has reached out to the New York City police and acknowledged in an interview with the Times that same month that he believed he owed officers an apology over his past remarks.
Asked what he had said recently to two dozen police officers in which he reportedly apologized to them, Mamdani said “I apologized for the language that I used and I spoke to them about the fact that I want to work with them to deliver public safety because what we're seeing in the city right now is we're asking officers to do nearly everything we can think of.”
“We used to ask officers to focus on serious crimes. Now we're asking them to focus also on the mental health crisis, to focus also on homelessness,” he added.
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